Fecal Sludge Management: A smelly but fruitful business!

Today, 2.1 billion people in urban areas use non-sewered (or on-site) sanitation facilities. While much of the work in rural areas is focused on creating and sustaining open defecation free communities and generating demand for communities to construct toilets, the downstream activities of collecting and transporting fecal sludge present a unique challenge for urban residents. These services are mostly provided by private operators, and are generally uncontrolled and unregulated. The inadequate disposal of fecal sludge in the environment represents a direct threat to public health and negates the positive outcomes from behavioral change and improvements in sanitation access.

The urban population in developing countries, and in particular the poor, rely on fecal sludge collection and transportation services that are often not affordable. In addition, pit emptying is often done by hand, exposing the operators to serious health risks (see figure below). Often mechanical emptiers, using vacuum trucks, charge excessive fees to customers but do not pay taxes or comply with laws and standards due to a general lack of regulation for these services. This makes it a highly profitable business. For example an emptying service provider in Abuja makes US$ 15,000 per month.

Manual emptier in Senegal, also called Baay Pelles

To better understand the markets for these services, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded a study [1] that analyzes the fecal sludge management sector and its operating models in 30 cities in Asia and Africa. The cities studied had populations of 100,000 – 5 million.

The study surveyed 13,000 households and 150 fecal sludge emptying and transportation service providers. The population of the 30 cities selected represents over 67 million people or 12 million households, providing a relatively comprehensive picture of urban sanitation services across ten countries.

The baseline information and findings of the study will be shared with sector stakeholders to help build sustainable service provision for sanitation and formulate policy recommendations to improve business sustainability.

The recommendations of the study addressed various issues faced by service providers in FSM and in particular how to improve profitability by proposing a more adequate business model, as well as measures to create an enabling environment for these services (as illustrated in the chart below).

Proposed business model

The study also recommends the use of innovative solutions such as using geo tubes to create sludge transfer stations, which will reduce costs and increase the number of trips per day (which creates more profit for the operators and serves additional households). Geo tubes are containers made of permeable textiles used for dewatering sludge and sediment (see picture below). This solution has worked well in Malaysia, where the utility placed geo tubes in several strategic locations, resulting in a reduction of overall operations expenses by 37% and an increase of 35% in revenues.

Geo tubes in Malaysia

The study also focused on other issues relating to the sanitation value chain, particularly the safe disposal and treatment of sludge. Wastewater treatment plants – if they exist – are in many cases inadequate for the size of the cities they serve, and fecal sludge treatment sites are scarce or inexistent. Safe re-use of human waste is also a sector that needs to be further developed, as it offers opportunities to create income-generating activities and produce bio energy.

Hello, I received more details on this information request that I hope will be helpful. Please let me know if you have any relevant info: ----------------------------- Is there any academic research that has been conducted that looks at levels of fecal contamination of surrounding environment due to anal cleansing. Obviously if this is connected with open de […]

Hello. I've been working with Andrew Whitesell at Beaumont for the past few months and we would like to take this opportunity to provide an update on the FSOI project. Fecal Sludge Omni-Ingestor Project update Start & End Date: 2011 – TBD (to be determined; the contract has been extended to accommodate a changing or growing scope of work) Type of Fu […]

Dear all One of our cewas-ians needs your support to win a Swiss Sustainability Prize (Prix eco Swisscanto. She needs a few more likes in order to win the first prize of 15'000 CHF to support her work. See her request below (Deadline is tomorrow Wednesday 04.03.15 - so please be fast ): Please click on this Facebook link (http://goo.gl/Rrr1pi) and […]

Hi Nicola, I am a colleague of Moritz and one of my research fields is quantifying and characterising faecal slugde on a city-wide scale. The hyperlink to the FAQ project, Moritz refers to in his post leads you to a website with publications about the approach we have implemented in Kampala/Uganda and Hanoi/Vietnam. I could see the application of the latrine […]

Hi Elisabeth, No - I wasn't thinking about it for travelers (if you mean international travelers - although I suppose they might use it too), but anyone who is visiting a town and needs to find a loo. And as well as finding the facility in the first place, I was thinking more as a means to monitor the quality of service provided by the operators of publ […]

With the fact that nearly 35% of Delhi slum dwellers still practise open defecation, most of community and public toilets in the capital remains non-functional; the present scenario doesn’t seem to meet the goals of Delhi Master Plan for making the city Open Defecation Free (ODF) by 2015. In this article, Ajay Sinha, Chief Operating Officer, Feedback Foundat […]

We have chosen the winners of our Picturing CLTS photo competition. Thank you to everyone who submitted photos. It was great to see such diverse depictions of CLTS in action and of many related aspects like handwashing, inclusive WASH and monitoring.